Can the rumours be true? Can apocalypse-hastening ITV breakfast show GMTV really be about to cut to an eternal ad break, without the chance, when we come back, to hear from the inspirational survivor of a brutal sex attack – and win £10,000 with Keith Chegwin in Orlando? I'm afraid the runes do not look good.

This week, ITV became the sole owner of GMTV after acquiring the remaining stake from Disney – who perhaps found it too lobotomising next to the rest of their output – and a review into the operation was promptly launched. There are suggestions ITV will replace it with something marginally more heavyweight – a child reading the news, say, or a coma simulation programme.

Naturally, none of us could bear to write GMTV's obituary prematurely. But it bestrode the world like a – well, like something that couldn't really bestride things. In an item to mark the anniversary of Disney's Snow White, presenter Fiona Phillips remarked to viewers: "The Holocaust actually began three years after Walt Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Which puts it in perspective really." You might laugh. But Fiona would soon be approached by Gordon Brown to join his "government of all the talents", with a seat in the Lords and some responsibility for public health. Even more hilariously, she turned it down, which puts a few other things into perspective really.

How fitting that GMTV's ultimate demise should feel symbiotically linked to that of the New Labour government with which it was so nauseatingly cosy. Cast your mind back to Princess Di's death, which rookie PM Tony Blair marked with that excruciatingly hammy reading at Westminster Abbey, while Fiona reminded viewers that: "It's important to remember, at a time like this, that Diana backwards is 'an aid'." Weren't they just made for each other?

Of course, there is a chance that GMTV's pomp has passed you by, perhaps if you like to wake to the Today programme or somesuch, as opposed to Cheggers and the denizens of Inch-loss Island. But you must know that Mr Blair fell into the latter camp. Time and again he forewent a John Humphrys grilling for the chance to have Fiona compliment him on his tie.

You could scarcely keep him off the sofa, in fact, so it made sense that he chose one for the literal seat of his government, located in Downing Street's infamous den – or "the killing room", as a friend calls it. I always imagined him and Alastair ensconced on it to misinterpret a few intelligence briefings, before segueing into the next task with a classic GMTV link. "Well, from white phosphorus to the White Stripes, as we discuss which bands I'm going to pretend to Little Ant and Little Dec I have on my iPod." It seems apt that seconds before going live on GMTV the morning after the first night of bombing in Baghdad, Geoff Hoon should have turned frantically to an aide and demanded, "Are we at war?" GMTV and the secretary of state for defence: united in cluelessness.

In 2005, the co-dependent union between their two houses was sealed when GMTV presenter Kate Garraway married New Labour Zelig Derek Draper, and the pair set themselves up as one of Britain's foremost media power couples. The Garraway-Drapers crystallised the age, with their intellectual levity, their red-carpet homing devices, and their pathologically misjudged self-interest.

Take the time the then-home secretary diagnosed Kate's thyroid problem. "John Reid came on GMTV," Kate revealed to her public, "He took one look at me and said: 'Kate, you've lost so much weight, I'm worried.' I thought: 'You're helping to run this country – if you've spotted this, maybe there is something seriously wrong with me.'" That famous sense of perspective again.

It's much too glib to say that GMTV would end up deceiving its viewers just as the Blair government deceived the voters, but a lofty contempt for the public clearly underpinned the phone vote fraud for which the programme was fined a record £2m two years ago. Callers are estimated to have lost £35m collectively. Meanwhile, the crass remarks of quintessential GMTV presenter Phillips became ever more baroque, for all that the Sun's TV critic Ally Ross worked tirelessly to highlight them. "There are light moments though," Fiona observed to Kate and Gerry McCann. "You've acquired this odd celebrity status." Or consider this zinger from an interview with then business secretary John Hutton. "You know why I believe you're true to your word? You've got very nice socks and shoes."

It's not exactly what you'd call speaking truth to power, is it, and perhaps GMTV's haemorrhaging ratings can be in part attributed to viewers having decided that a more robust approach to dealing with the great and the good might benefit us all. Unfortunately, someone has yet to explain this to the show's publicist, whose bristling statement on this week's rumours ran: "Our programme will always be popular with housewives and with children; and high profile names from the leaders of all political parties to the latest evictee from The X Factor continue to choose GMTV over BBC Breakfast."